How to be me

September 2018 I want to face my death with stoic equanimity. These are the things I currently know about my death. The most important thing to remember is that my death is a worse event for those who love me than it is for me. This is for two related reasons. The first reason is that I will never have to endure life in a world without me in it. That's not so for the people who love me, unless they predecease me. I started to learn this in a rather shameful way. Jo and I were buying a house together for the first time. It would involve a large mortgage that needed both of our salaries to service. Jo had death in service life cover as part of her employee contract; I was self-employed and had no employee contract and not the slightest inclination to spend any of my income on life insurance.  I actually remember saying "Why on earth do I need life insurance? Why pay each month for the promise of a big sum of money that only arrives when I'm dead and gone?" The shame is ...

Why is this important to me? I have this suspicion that ever since the first glimmers of my consciousness started to flicker into life in my mother's womb, I have been trying to solve the puzzle of what it is to exist. Of course, this is the job of every newborn. And like the vast majority of newborns, before the age of two I'd performed that everyday miracle of making sense of what initially must have seemed random sensory inputs and turned myself into a being who could successfully communicate with the other beings who had summoned me into the world.  I hesitate to write about the small minority of newborns who fail this task. Is it possible that, for some of them at least, they have made a different sense entirely of the information streams they received, one that bears no relation to the sense their parents made but nonetheless is a making of sense, alien to us beyond our imagining? I suspect this is a romantic notion that any expert would rapidly debunk and any parent of s...

Draw a dot on a piece of paper. That dot is you, right here, right now. Are you okay with that? This is the first act of imagination I am asking you to perform. There will be more, of increasing levels of outrageousness. If you find yourself struggling, the trick is to just go with it. Pretend. Like when you were a small child and the toy farm animals and train set were real animals, real trains. Of course they were not real, you knew that back then, but what if they were? What happens when the cows and sheep climb aboard the train and the train flies off into space? Back to that dot that is you. Draw a very long line on either side of the dot. This is your timeline. To the left the line plunges back into your past, to the right it disappears into your future. A little way to the left of your dot is the day you were born, a tiny way before that the day you were conceived. The line goes an awful long way further back than that. And travel a little way along the line to your right, and s...

This is an attempt to construct a map of my beliefs. I know they are inside my brain, some for almost all my lifetime, others more recently formed. Yet, unlike memories, which accumulate with each daily experience, a belief is my mind's attempt to make sense of experience: experiences create memories, reflection upon memories creates beliefs. So, are my beliefs simply an accumulation of reflections upon memories of countless experiences, or do they have a greater coherence?  It is more accurate to say that each new belief is formed from reflection upon memories of both experiences and memories of previously formed beliefs. For our beliefs are no different from memories in their susceptibility to decay. Just as we can find ourselves asking of a memory "did that really happen? To me, or to someone else?" so too we can find ourselves asking "Why do I believe this?" and falling short of an answer. Over the course of these reflections I will be asking that second que...